You (24 page)

“Believe it, because there’s plenty more where that comes from.”

You take them by the hand like two naughty little girls and pull them back out onto the terrace, where you sit down and put your heads together and ask each other how you’re going to get Taja back on her feet without having to call an ambulance. Schnappi wants to look on the internet, because you can find everything on the internet, there are bound to be tips on withdrawal as well.

“Why not,” you say.

Schnappi disappears upstairs to Taja’s computer, while you get out your phone and call your mother to tell her you’re going to be spending the weekend at Taja’s. Stink also wants to call home; you give her your cell phone and keep an eye on how Taja is.

The bathroom door is shut. You knock.

“Everything okay in there?”

Nessi lets you in. Taja is lying curled up on the floor, covered with a dressing gown.

“Should we put her to bed?”

Nessi shakes her head. She’s glad that Taja’s asleep at last. So you turn out the bathroom light and leave the door open a crack. In the
kitchen you make sandwiches. Nessi goes through the cupboards and discovers a jar of pickled peppers.

When you come back out, Stink is asleep on one of the recliners. Nessi takes the chair beside her and eats the peppers with her fingers. Afterward she sighs contentedly and within a minute has fallen asleep.
Oh great
, you think, and look at your sleeping girlfriends and the table full of drugs. Even if you’re not the most experienced—two pills, Eric swore they were LSD, a few joints, and a catastrophic attempt to snort speed at a party—you know that a few dreams lie ahead of you, waiting to be dreamed. You lean forward, open the bag that’s already been started, and dip a finger into the white powder. You sniff it and wipe your finger on your jeans.

A small victory is still a victory
.

It’s important to keep a clear head. You’re aware that everything’s going to collapse without you here. It’s a good feeling, carrying that burden. You’re a family, somebody has to hold you all together.
If not me, who?
You listen out for sounds from Taja, and your eyes fall shut. It’s a bit like disappearing into a tub full of warm water.

Ten minutes. Fifteen.

The screams from the guest bathroom make you all jump.

Taja is crashing. Cramps, nausea, shivers. You all get her upstairs to bed and cover her with blankets. As soon as she’s calmed down a little, you think now it’ll get better, the worst is over, and then Taja succumbs once again to a fit of the shivers and it’s worse than before. She throws up every sip of water, there’s no point even thinking about solid food. Her hands claw at her belly as if she could grab the pain and pull it out. She leaves red scratches. She cries and fights you off. She says she’s itching all over. Her elbow catches Stink in the face, knocking her off the bed. You hold Taja tightly, she kicks out and screams at you to leave her alone. She calms down slowly. Her short hair sticks wetly to her head. She’s so exhausted that she falls asleep at last. It’s not real sleep, it’s pure unconsciousness. The sudden silence is scary. You’re all breathing heavily. Stink has a swelling under her eye and asks if it looks bad.

“You’ll need to put some ice on it,” you say and go downstairs with Stink to cool her cheek.

Schnappi has finished her search on the internet, and comes downstairs with a stack of paper. She asks if she’s missed anything. Stink takes the ice pack off her eye and shows her the swelling.

“Taja went nuts.”

“A good thing I wasn’t there.”

You want to know what Schnappi has found.

She puts the printouts on the table.

“I don’t think it’s cocaine. The withdrawal symptoms don’t fit. It could be heroin, but heroin’s normally brown. So I did a bit of searching and discovered that there’s such a thing as white heroin. That stuff’s unusually pure.”

“Taja used to say her dad did coke,” Stink joins in. “That’s definitely coke.”

“Are you even listening to me?” Schnappi asks crossly, and Schnappi never gets cross. “I just said the withdrawal symptoms don’t fit.”

“I heard you,” Stink replies defiantly.

Schnappi flicks through the pages.

“As I wasn’t sure, I just printed out everything I could find about withdrawal. Whether it was coke, speed, or heroin. But mostly I’m worried about Taja’s circulation. If we don’t do anything, it could fail. And she might …”

She breaks off. You guess what she was going to say. Nessi comes out with it: “Taja isn’t going to die on us.”

“How could you even think something like that?” you yell at her.

“You thought the same thing,” Nessi says in self-defense.

“Yes, but we didn’t blurt it out.”

Schnappi finds the page and holds it out. Black on white.

“What crap,” says Stink, and brings her palm down on the table. “Taja only took the stuff for five days, and that’s not going to kill anybody.”

“Did you see the way she went crazy before?”

“No, I kept my eyes shut, Ruth. Of course I saw it. But you don’t just kick the bucket like that, okay?”

Schnappi fans the printed pages.

“There is more.”

You stare at the printout, then you stir yourselves, each of you picks up a stack and you start reading.

The upshot is frightening. All the drugs that could help Taja are prescription-only. Which leaves you with herb tea, vitamins, and mineral pills. One of the articles says that purely physical heroin withdrawal can take up to two weeks, and that in comparison to other drugs heroin leaves the greatest potential for addiction. It doesn’t say anywhere how the body reacts after only five days of drug consumption. You all set your pages down. You’re so exhausted by all the shop talk that there’s nothing more to say.

Taja’s attacks continue into the afternoon. Crying, choking, whimpering. Taja can’t lie down anymore, so you walk around the garden with her again. It’s a good thing the property’s screened off by hedges. Walking helps with the cramps and distracts her. When she feels that ants are crawling under her skin, you scrub her down with a loofah. Your girls talk to her, you don’t take your eyes off her for a moment.

You read Schnappi’s printout for a second time and make a list of the drugs that might help. You want to ask someone who has a clue. You don’t know who that might be.

Just before closing time, Schnappi and Stink go shopping for food. Nessi stays with Taja, and while she runs a bath for her and helps her into the tub, you strip the bed for the third time and wash the sheets. Schnappi and Stink come back with fruit, vegetables, and cartons of juice. They’ve also got some pretzel sticks and Coca-Cola because Schnappi says it always helps. And pizza for the rest of you.

You clear the table on the terrace. You decide the drugs have to go, so you and Stink carry them upstairs. You didn’t like Taja having to look at them all the time anyway.

“Who do you think it all belongs to?” you ask, when you’re putting the bags back into the metal case.

“Doesn’t matter,” says Stink. “Some idiot will come and get it if he starts missing it.”

Ten minutes later you eat. Taja tries to keep her soup down, crunches on pretzel sticks, and chugs two bottles of Coke. For a while everything’s the same as always. As if Taja just had the flu, and might go walking around the neighborhood with you, and just be your Taja again. Chaos is laughing at you. You’re tired, you snatch some sleep from time to time, you’re troubled and always present in your sleep.

The day goes, the night comes.

In the morning Stink makes a decision and you’re not aware of it. Taja’s sleeping upstairs, Schnappi is lying down in one of the guest rooms, you’re sitting with Nessi and Stink on the terrace, the house is in silence. It’s eight in the morning and you have shadows under your eyes.
We’re never going to keep this up for two weeks
, you think, when Nessi says, “We could call Taja’s mother.”

“And what are you going to say to her? That Taja’s in withdrawal and has only recently discovered that her mother’s still alive? Don’t forget to mention that her father’s downstairs in the freezer and can’t really look after Taja.”

“I knew there was a catch,” says Nessi and yawns.

You look at her. Maybe it’s sleep deprivation, maybe you’re about to get your period, but either way Nessi’s never been as lovely as she is this morning.
Or else it’s her damned pregnancy
, you think and wonder how long Nessi will keep suppressing the truth. None of you has said a sensible word on the subject. Whether she’s going to have an abortion or not. Who the father is. Where things go from here.

“You’ll be a brilliant mother,” you say, “regardless of what happens.”

“If I do become a mother.”

“Yes, if.”

Nessi comes around the table and kisses first you, then Stink, on
the cheek. She says that was a nice try on your part, but the discussion’s postponed because she can’t keep her eyes open and now she’s going in to lie down in one of the guest rooms. You’d like to follow her and call it a day, but you know there has to be a solution. Taja urgently needs help. And if nobody comes up with a solution, then nothing will be solved.

“It’s just you and me,” you say.

“I’ve been asleep for an hour,” Stink says, eyes closed.

You put your feet up and are very glad that no one’s got you pregnant. And as you’re thinking about your little compact life, you doze off and that’s exactly the moment Stink was waiting for. First she blinks, then her eyes open and she’s wide awake. You aren’t aware of a thing. Stink waits a few minutes for you to sink into deep sleep before she gets up and makes her preparations.

Stink has a plan, but she isn’t sure what the rest of you will think of it.
Sometimes you’re better off not knowing
, she thinks to herself, and before one of you girls wakes up, she’s got on her Vespa and pushed it to the street so that no one hears the noise. In her left jacket pocket is the list of drugs that you’ve copied down from Schnappi’s printout. No one’s to say later on that Stink was unprepared. It’s a pity you are asleep. You should have seen her riding the Vespa to Charlottenburg through the lukewarm Thursday morning, to turn a boringly normal boy into a boringly normal martyr.

A martyr’s job isn’t easy. He has to make sacrifices, he has to be selfless and endure an incredible amount of suffering. You will follow this sequence to the letter, and start with the sacrifices. You skip school and try to find out who can get hold of the prescription drugs for you. There are a few sources. You could try Mehmed in Wedding, but you could also try Timo, who only lives two streets away. But you know that isn’t going to work. You have to make sure you do it the right way. Nothing happens without Darian’s approval. He picks up your call after the second ring.

“Hey, you found your phone.”

“It was at the pizza stand.”

Darian laughs.

“Your uncle probably shoved it in his pocket and spent the whole night calling Bosnian sex lines.”

“We’re from Slovenia.”

“What?”

You spend the next ten minutes listening to your friend telling you about the new energy food he’s found on the internet, then you ask, as if in passing, how you would get hold of prescription drugs.

“What’s up? Planning to open a pharmacy?”

You laugh as if you’d never heard anybody say that before, and say the drugs aren’t for you. Darian sees through you right away.

“Mirko, you old Casanova, what’s her name?”

Of course you blush. A lot of people think you’re an errand boy, others think you’re a sort of modern slave who does everything his
boss tells him to. The fact that your boss is just seventeen doesn’t bother anybody. You see yourself as an apprentice. Darian took you under his wing, when you were new at school and a few guys decided to kick your ass. He took them apart and said you looked as if you needed a friend. You’ve been pals ever since; even after Darian left school nothing changed in that respect, because neighbors stay neighbors, and in this part of town a friend is a friend forever. You do little jobs for him and that’s how you’ve been working your way slowly up the ladder for a year. Step by step. You buy stuff for parties, fill glasses, roll joints, and are errand boy and best friend in one. You don’t see any injustice in that, you know your strengths. Darian knows he can talk to you, unlike the guys in the crowd. At some point he discovered you both spoke the same language, and he didn’t mean German. Sometimes you wish you could show Darian how loyal you really are. Not by hiding under a car. You’re thinking more about a hail of bullets, and you throwing yourself in front of him to save his life. You must have absorbed martyrdom with your mother’s milk. Your mother was exactly like that until your father dumped her.